Al-Kindi

Abū Ya ʿ qūb ibn Ishaaq al -Kindi (Arabic أبو يعقوب بن إسحاق الكندي, DMG Abū Ya ʿ am qūb Ishaq al -Kindi, Latinized: Alkindus, German also: Alkendi; * to 800 in Kufa; † 873 in Baghdad ), was an Arab philosopher, scientist, mathematician, physician, and musician.

Philosophy History important he is - in addition to their own contributions - also because of its translation activity. In Baghdad, he left numerous writings, among others Translation of Aristotle, Plato, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and John Philoponus into Arabic. Especially Aristotle's natural philosophical writings were read by him. His treatise On the intellect was received wide for centuries of Arab and Latin intellectuals. Even theological debates were influenced by his concepts.

Life

Abū Ya ʿ ibn Ishaaq al -Kindi qūb ( the tribe of Kinda ) was of Arab origin and was of his many non-Arab comrades and colleagues ( they were mostly Persians ) therefore called " the Arab philosopher ". He leads his family tree to the old princes Kinda back, which is not detectable, but suggesting that he came from a wealthy family. He was born about 800 in Kufa, where his father was governor. The aforementioned wealth of his ancestors led a hand to a highly educated and skilled tribe, of which al -Kindi benefited in his training, as to be able to deal with the possibility of very many translators later. He spent most of his life in Baghdad, which was the cultural center of the Islamic world itself at that time and allowed him to deal with different cultures and doctrines. He is also one of the first major "translator " as he had translated a large part of the work of Aristotle, Plato and Neoplatonism. al -Kindi himself built it on his own works. He had access to the court of the Caliph, even if not recorded, in which position. At times, he may have fallen in disgrace, his library was confiscated for some time and the absence of his exact birth and death years, suggesting that he should have died in a subordinate position.

But he was known not only as a philosopher but as a physician, mathematician, physicist, pharmacologist (of Alchemy on the other hand he held a little), astrologer, geographer and royal tutor at the court of al - Ma'mun. For a long time he was also a theologian, especially for his attempts, philosophy and religion to one. In fact, he was the mu'tazilistischen school very close to - or rather this to him, as it is known as rationalistic oriented Islamic school. Al -Kindi probably died around the year 870. In research, the appropriate assumptions vary from 866 to 873

Art and philosophy

The philosophical work al - Kindi was influenced above all by his many translations, which he then corrected himself usually. The follow developments in his independent works. Increasingly indicated a close to Plato and texts in the tradition of Neoplatonism, but also to Aristotle, have a strong position in Kindi library whose works.

On First Philosophy

In his main work "On First Philosophy " by Aristotle, the influences are especially clear. It is divided into four sections:

• In the first part, he lays down the framework of the investigation from and stated that the task of the philosopher is the search for truth, so the search for the causes of matter ( al-' unsur ), shape (al- sura ), genus (al- Dzin ) and type ( al - nau'a ) of things (based on Aristotle's " metaphysics ").
• In the second part the perspective changes, and Kindi says that the world is finite and the infinity of the world is only a power. It shows that the dimensions of space are finite (based on Aristotle's " On the Heavens "), even the time was like but finally ( here he goes one step further ) and therefore must have a beginning in time (based on John Philoponus ).
• In the third part he explains the existence of God with the argument that the multiplicity of the sensible things on the existence of the original A is based (according to the Neoplatonist Proclus ).
• In the fourth part Kindi describes God and uses a negative theology in the sense of the late Neoplatonism (according to Proclus ); the text but again decided with a twist: The remote and unknown God has our world causes not from eternity but in time out of nothing (according to the religious dogma of creation out of nothing ).

Its central philosophy was initially based on the mathematics; it can be found numbers game in his writings. According to him, no one " philosopher " was without have not studied mathematics or logic. Yet the world to him is a work of God, whose activity is mediated from top to bottom: all Higher acts on the Low one, but not the Induced on his ( at the stage of being standing over him) cause. This creates a continuous causality in the world whose knowledge allows to predict things to come. The world consists of the (divine) spirit, the (material) world body and the soul, which is located in between. The human soul is an emanation of the world soul, so bound up in their effects on the body, but their spiritual nature independent. The soul has come down in the world of sense, with a clue to their original state and is therefore not native here. Salvation can only find in the ascent into the spiritual world, where all their needs are met. For this, they must, however, free from all material and physical desires - so here find significant Islamic elements feeder.

About the intellect

As the principal 's own work ( that is, independent of the templates by Islam or Greek philosophy ) should apply " About the intellect " which has the most own concepts, even if they turn to Aristotle's " On the Soul " and some late antique commentators (Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius and Johannes Philoponus ) derives. It is about Aristotle's distinction between active and passive intellect. Could the commentators reason not to find out, as defined Kindi: The active intellect is the cause and the universal principle of all intellects and he was the spontaneity of thought and without rest. The thinking is structured in three stages:

• The potential intellect ( think the power of man )
• The acquired intellect ( the ability of people to do something - for example, can write - but it is not just exercise, also called intellect updated )
• The visible intellect ( the ability of the people to apply the acquired knowledge, also called demonstrative intellect )

These three stages are forms of passive ( receptive ) intellect. So you can see the four intellects (ie the active and passive, with its four intermediate steps) series chronologically. This is adopted by many other philosophers, even in Europe.

Definitions of philosophical concepts

Another important work Kindi, the definitions of the terms. As mentioned he corrected the translations given by him in order by ourselves Among other things, this was also a paper on the definition of the term " philosophy ", which are also essential to characterize his philosophy. It is definition of six points of:

• Etymologically, philosophy is the " love of wisdom "
• Philosophy is the attempt to assimilate the divine acts in line with: the human assets ( What is philosophy? )
• Philosophy is the concern about death, one being the concern for the exit of the soul from the body and the other, the concern for the killing of desire ( objects of philosophy)
• Philosophy is the art of arts and the wisdom of wisdom ( origin of philosophy )
• Things are either corporeal or incorporeal. Man is but a body, a soul and Akzidenzia ( attributes) and the soul afterwards consists of substance. To know its substance, man must know himself. Detects the man all its three components, recognizes the whole world ( philosophy as self-knowledge of man)
• Philosophy is knowledge of the eternal universals, their being and their causes, to the extent (philosophy from reading ) possible for man

Kindi was the first Islamic Aristotelians, even when he went out in contrast to Aristotle of a finite world. A big mistake but happened with the translations under his direction. The Enneads of Plotinus (rather platonic ) are erroneously attributed to Aristotle as "Theology of Aristotle " and confused in Islamic philosophy as " Neo-Platonic Aristotelianism ." This error will be noticed until much later and runs throughout much of the history of Islamic philosophy.

Cryptology

In addition, al -Kindi also dealt with cryptology. He is considered one of the pioneers in the field of cryptanalysis, which is the art of winning a ciphertext without knowing the key used to encrypt the original plaintext. He wrote the first known treatise on cryptanalysis, which was rediscovered only in 1987 in Istanbul Suleiman Osman archive. It is entitled "Discourse on deciphering cryptographic messages" showed in the Kindi, as the mono alphabetic substitution, which in Europe was regarded at the time as " unbreakable ", could be broken by using the statistical method of frequency analysis. The critically important passage from Kindi handwriting reads:

" One way to decipher an encrypted message, provided we know their language, is to find a different plain text in the same language, which is long enough to fill one or two leaves, and then count how many times each letter occurs. We call the common letters of the "first", the second most commonly the 'second', the following until we have counted all the letters in the plaintext sample the "third " and so on. Then we consider the ciphertext, we want to decrypt, and also organize its symbols. We will find the most common symbol and give it the shape of the "first" letter of the plaintext sample, the second most common symbol is the 'second' letters, the third leading to the " third " letter and so on until we want all the symbols of the cryptogram, we decrypt have assigned in this way. "

Expenditure

• On First Philosophy AL Ivry: Al- Kindi 's Metaphysics, State University of New York 1974, ISBN 0-87395-092-5. Contains in addition to the translation of al - falsafa al - ula ( The First Philosophy ) in the output of AH Abu Ridah, 2 vols., Cairo, 1950-53 into English a broad comment section with evidence of references to the metaphysics of Aristotle, and a brief historical introduction to this topic.